In Germany the absence of a strong tradition
of Impressionism, combined with the lack
of any dominant artistic centre, produced a relatively mild form of Post-Impressionism,
compared to France. True, the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch caused
a commotion in Berlin in 1892 with such stark works as Sick Child
(18856; National Gallery, Oslo), which resonated with avant-garde
circles. But the predominant style among modern
artists in Germany remained Naturalism,
as exemplified by the works of Hans von Marees and Lovis Corinth. (See
also: Post-Impressionism in Holland.)
A small number of painters, like the Swiss-born Arnold Bocklin and Ferdinand
Hodler, who worked mainly in Germany, moved from Naturalism to Symbolism,
as shown by Hodler's Eurhythmy (1895, Kunstmuseum, Berne). An important
figure behind the introduction of modern French
painting into Germany was the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who
did much to ensure that the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin and the other French
Post-Impressionist painters
came to the attention of the German public. In addition, visits by artists
between France and Germany such as Alexei von Jawlenski, Paul Serusier,
Maurice Denis, Jan Verkade, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and others, also contributed
to an awareness of French Post-Impressionist
painting within the forthcoming expressionist
movement in Germany.

DEVELOPMENT OF ART
For details of art movements
and styles, see: History of Art.

Background

"Post-Impressionist schools are flourishing,
one might say raging in Switzerland, Austro-Hungary and most of all Germany,
But so far as I have discovered they have not added any positive element
to the general stock of ideas." These words were written by the art
critic Roger Fry (1866-1934), in
his introduction to the catalogue of the 2nd Post-Impressionist Exhibition
held in London in 1912. The show included English and Russian paintings
hung next to masterpieces by Cezanne and Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse.
Fry was expressing the prejudice of the English against foreign art that
was not French, and made an exception only for Russia. (Fry also ignored
the "British" Scottish Colourists.)
He was right to say that Post-Impressionism was 'raging' in Germany, and,
allowing for the looseness of the term, it had been since the 1880s. Centres,
responding in many different ways to impulses coming from France, were
to be found in almost every sizeable German city, in Munich and Berlin,
Dusseldorf and Hamburg, and also in smaller towns such as Weimar, Darmstadt
and Dresden. Each had its individual artistic characteristics.

Germany, politically united since 1870
under the Prussian monarchy, remained in many ways culturally fragmented,
and although Berlin was to play an increasingly important and aggressive
role in the art life of Germany in this period, it was never the undisputed
centre as was Paris or London. This diffusion makes German
Art of the 19th Century more complex and fuller of internal contradictions
than that of France. It is no coincidence that the history of Impressionism
and Post-Impressionism in France has been discussed and understood either
in terms of technical mastery and innovation, or as a product of the life
of the artist and his interaction with his friends, while art in Germany
has often been viewed as a symptom of the cultural, even political world
in which it was created. Few systematic studies of individual artists
exist. Even in the case of Edvard Munch (1863-1944), the best known and
most studied of the artists under consideration here, the catalogue
raisonne, which alone can give a complete survey of the artist's work,
is lacking. German painters like Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Max
Slevogt (1868-1932), and many other artists working in Germany have
been less studied, and the difficulty in getting an overview is greater.

German Impressionism

Impressionism had a strange history in
Germany; indeed it is arguable that the very expression is misleading.
Although artists like Manet, Renoir and Monet were well known by the end
of the century, their direct influence on the so-called Impressionist
painters in Germany was not profound. Liebermann, for example, evolved
his style partly through his admiration for German realist
painting as done by artists like Wilhelm
Leibl (1844-1900), who in turn had benefited greatly from contact
with Gustave Courbet (1819-77),
and the direct foreign influences on his stylistic evolution were from
the quiet naturalism of the French Barbizon
school and Dutch Hague school. He visited Barbizon in 1874 to be near
Jean-Francois Millet (1814-75)
and in the 1880s he spent several summers in Holland working with Jozef
Israels (1824-1911). The German painters who visited Paris in the 1880s
knew little of their French Impressionist contemporaries, with the possible
exception of Edouard Manet
(1832-83). Not until Neo-Impressionism
is there a clear and unambiguous link with France in German painterly
technique, and even this was in the first instance mediated by the Belgian
Henri Van de Velde (1863-1957), before being transmitted to artists such
as Paul Baum (1859-1932), Christian Rohlfs (1849-1938) and Curt Herrmann.
What is known as German 'Impressionism' has its roots partly in the early
paintings of the Berlin artist Adolph
Von Menzel (1815-1905), and partly in the work of realists based in
Munich in the 1860s and 1870s - Wilhelm Leibl, Hans Thoma (1839-1924)
and Wilhelm Trubner. However strands of Symbolism and Idealism derived
from Romanticism were never far from the
surface in the 1880s. Artists such as Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901) and Hans
Von Marees (1837-1887) were the admired though often controversial models
who exerted an influence not dissimilar to that of Puvis
de Chavannes (1824-98) in France. The younger generation in the 1880s
thus had to contend with huge stylistic contradictions which were not
resolved until the very end of the century.

In addition to these stylistic contradictions
there were also social pressures. The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists
in France initially reached a relatively narrow public, while the German
painters, like larger fish in smaller ponds, became the focus of considerable
attention if they were reasonably talented! Liebermann, for example, played
an active role in society from an early age, founding exhibiting institutions
and mixing with the new social and economic elites that were rapidly developing
in Germany. Academic painters such as Anton Von Werner (1843-1915) and
their champions in the establishment opposed the 'Impressionists' and
Kaiser Wilhelm II personally denounced their work as 'plein-air
painting' (Freilichtmalerei). One of these painters was Corinth,
who demonstrates this tension between realism
and Idealism in his exuberant The Childhood of Zeus (1905, Kunsthalle,
Bremen). It represents his own wife and son - a typical Wilhelmine family
- but faintly disguised in a mythological setting. Only two artists resolved
this contradiction between modern life and myth that was the fundamental
artistic search in the 1880s and 1890s. Neither painter was German. Both,
however, played an influential role in Germany and found their most important
platforms there. They were a Norwegian, Munch, and a Swiss, Hodler.

Edvard Munch in
Germany (1892-5)

Edvard
Munch is the only northern artist of this period who has gained a
comparable international status to the great Post-Impressionist painters
working in France. His importance lies in his creation of a shocking and
archetypal image of an alienated northern European society, which has
obvious affinities with the work of Strindberg and Ibsen, two great Scandinavian
writers who, like Munch, extracted a universal mythic potential out of
their bourgeois Scandinavian milieu. All three were first acclaimed abroad
in Germany. Munch's landscapes, interiors and portraits all reflect that
dark enclosed environment where physical and spiritual light were at a
premium. Although Munch was recognized as a talent in Norway at an early
age, it was in Germany that he found a large enough stage from which to
make his first major contribution to modern
art. Like painters from all over Europe he studied in Paris, where,
in the late 1880s, he saw the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists,
quickly absorbing the lessons of their art. After a brief period in which
his work reflected the objective approach of the Impressionists (as in
Rue Lafayette, 1891, National Gallery, Oslo), he developed a bold
colouristic symbolism influenced by the work of Paul
Gauguin (1848-1903) and his Pont-Aven
circle, which he used to convey scenes full of psychological drama.

In 1892, Munch, who had just had his second
one-man exhibition in the Norwegian capital, Christiania, was invited
to exhibit at the Association of Berlin Artists (Verein Berliner Kunstler),
the principal exhibiting society in Berlin for those artists working in
a 'realist-impressionist' manner. His paintings were publicly described
as Ibsenish mood paintings (Ibsen sche Stimmungbilder). They caused
a critical outrage - the first of several that Munch was to provoke when
his pictures were shown in various parts of Germany. These works played
an important part in encouraging German artists to experiment with new
styles and techniques. The members of the Verein, shocked by the
succes de scandale in the press which marked the appearance of
the paintings at the exhibition, voted by 120 to 105 to have the pictures
removed. Munch had his defenders, among them Liebermann and the art critic
Julius Meier-Graefe, who more than any other critic was responsible in
this period for supporting every stylistic development in painting
and various styles of applied
art as it arose, whether from France, from England or within Germany
itself. Munch's supporters even included a few rich young art collectors.
Encouraged by his succes de scandale, he decided to settle in Berlin
where he soon found a place in the intellectual circle around Strindberg
and the Polish Decadent novelist Stanislaw Przybyszewski. In his paintings
and prints Munch began a period of intense creative activity, and conceived
many themes that were to recur throughout his life, including the Frieze
of Life, a cycle on love and death, of which Ashes (1894, Nasjonalgalleriet,
Oslo), Puberty (1894, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo), Jealousy
(1895, Rasmus Meyers Sammlinger, Bergen) and The Scream (1893,
National Gallery, Oslo) form a part. He stayed in Berlin only until 1895,
though he continued to exhibit there regularly. But this short period
was arguably the most important of his career.

Ferdinand Hodler

Like Munch, Ferdinand
Hodler (1853-1918) came from a geographical environment that was isolated
and mountainous. In Switzerland as in Norway, there was a tradition which
went back to the eighteenth century of a sublime approach towards landscape
painting, with the mountains and lakes providing the perfect subject,
but by c.1880 the artistic climate in both countries was dominated by
realism. By the end of the 1880s, Hodler, as a result of a religious experience
which almost caused him to enter the church, began to transform the realistic
approach of his early paintings, developing an increasingly complex symbolism
in a series of very large canvases, symmetrical and rhythmic, which can
be compared to Munch's cycles on the themes of life and death. In the
most famous of them, Night (1891, Kunstmuseum, Berne), the various
aspects of sleep - nightmares, dreams, love and rest - are emblematically
represented. These paintings are religious, but not in any Christian sense.
Rather they are manifestations of beauty, purity and redemption through
art - altarpieces of a new personal faith. In Eurhythmy (1895,
Kunstmuseum, Berne) a frieze of old men move slowly across the canvas.
Their stylized gestures have something in common with the dance movements
evolved by teachers such as Emile Jacques Dalcroze, with whom Hodler later
became friendly. The painting represents a contemplative search, full
of tragic implications, for spiritual equanimity. It is a search for an
alternative to the positivist and materialist world which dominated the
culture of late nineteenth-century Europe.

After showing Night in Switzerland,
Hodler took it with him to Paris, where it was accepted in 1891 at the
Societe Nationale by a jury which included Puvis de Chavannes,
Dagnan-Bouveret and Roll. Hodler also exhibited at the Salon de la
Rose + Croix in 1892. However, it was in Germany at various Secessionist
exhibitions that he achieved his greatest success. Night was exhibited
in Berlin in 1894, and in 1897 it and Eurhythmy won a gold medal
at the Munich Glasplast. From the 1890s onwards Hodler was receiving various
commissions for mural painting to
decorate town halls, universities and museums, first in Switzerland, and
then in Germany. In addition to his fresco
murals and large canvases, Hodler also ceveloped a manner of treating
landscapes, of which one of the earliest mature examples is Lake Geneva
from Chexbres (1895, Kunsthaus, Zurich). These landscapes of the mountains
and lakes of Switzerland also express the unity, balance and permanence
of the universe. The parallels between them and the landscapes of Paul
Cezanne have often been drawn; in 1913 the well-known German art critic
Fritz Burger made this comparison the subject of a book entitled Cezanne
und Hodler. Both artists monumentalized the forms of rocks, mountains
and lakes, ignoring the human presence, but Cezanne focused on the coloured
nuances in the scene as a means of suggesting form and space and ultimately
reality, while Hodler created a heightened reality through precision of
line and the elimination of aerial perspective.

Whereas Munch and Hodler aimed to create
a sublime yet modern thematic repertoire, the aims of many of the most
interesting German artists in the 1880s and 1890s were more modest in
their interpretation of subject matter. The generation of Idealist painters
(symbolists, romantics), Hans Von Marees and Arnold
Bocklin, were rejected in Germany by many of these modernists who
supported the Impressionist movements. The opposition was illustrated
in the controversial attack by Meier-Graefe (the principal supporter of
the Impressionists in Germany) on Bocklin in 1905, called Der Fall
Bocklin (The Case of Bocklin), in which he called Bocklin's paintings
irrelevant to reality as well as fanciful and 'wrong' in technique. However,
Idealist strands continued, for example in the work of Max
Klinger (1857-1920), and particularly in Munich in the work of secessionist
Franz von Stuck (1863-1928) and the illustrator Thomas Theodor Heine (1867-1948).
Their decorative style and representation of erotic decadence contrast
with the more philosophical seriousness of Munch or Hodler.

Naturalism

Many of the most interesting German painters
were in search of a more direct naturalism. Amongst them were three artists
represented here, Liebermann, Corinth and Slevogt, who became the advanced
artistic establishment in Berlin during the 1890s, and ultimately its
leading Secessionist painters. Liebermann was a Berlin-based artist; Corinth
and Slevogt originally worked in Munich, but in the late 1890s both moved
to Berlin, where they found a more favourable critical reception. They
evolved a realistic approach to painting through an increasingly rapid
painterly handling which foreshadows some of the techniques adopted by
the Die Brucke group.

Max Liebermann

Eva (1883, Kunsthalle, Hamburg),
the earlier painting by Max
Liebermann was painted in a single day, in spite of its strong and
direct composition. The broad handling of paint and bright colour
has little in common with contemporary French Impressionist
paintings despite the open-air effects in the background. The painting
possesses a pathos which is much closer to those works by Jules
Bastien-Lepage (1848-84) which many English painters took as their
model in French art. The Dutch subjects which Liebermann favoured, and
the tradition of painterly handling, looked back to two artists much admired
by Liebermann and his contemporaries - Frans
Hals (1580-1666) and Rembrandt
(1606-69). Hals appealed on account of his brilliant technique, Rembrandt
for his Innerlichkeit (inwardness). In 1876 and 1877 Liebermann
painted a series of copies after Hals, whose influence is seen in his
portrait art and in the broad,
virtuoso strokes of The Parrot Walk (Papageienallee) of 1902 (Kunsthalle,
Bremen), a picture freer in technique than Eva.

Lovis Corinth

The values of Hals and Rembrandt were also
understood in terms of their German or Nordic qualities. Holland was to
be absorbed as 'Low Germany' into a pan-Germanic cultural empire which
was discussed on many levels in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.
Rembrandt became a potent cultural symbol. In his Self-Portrait with
Model (1901, Kunstmuseam, Winterthur) Lovis
Corinth is identifying himself both with Rembrandt and with Bismarck.
At this point the myth of Rembrandt and the myth that had grown around
the old Iron Chancellor of Germany had much in common. Many books appeared
in Germany from the 1890s onwards with titles such as Rembrandt als
Erzieher (1890) and Der Rembrandtdeutsche (1892), both by Julius
Langbehn. In Rembrandt, ein kunst-philosophischer Versuch (1916),
Georg Simmel, one of the most noted sociologists of his time, wrote of
that 'expression of the spiritual' (Ausdruck des Seelichen) which
he saw as Rembrandt's achievement. It was this which the German 'Impressionist'
artists strove to combine with naturalistic observation, and which the
Expressionists were later to achieve through different techniques; the
concept of 'the spiritual' (das Geistige), which Kandinsky
also made into the central element in his art and theory, was deeply rooted
in German art.

In 1890 Corinth and Slevogt were in Munich,
then an important art centre, Franz
von Lenbach (1836-1904), who had also created Rembrandtesque portraits
of Bismarck, was the most respected Munich painter at this time. The more
progressive artists, led by Von Stuck, were in contact with Symbolist
circles in Paris, and in 1892 formed the Munich
Secession - the first secessionist movement in Germany. The artists
who showed at this first exhibition included Corinth, Slevogt, Uhde and
Trubner - the latter two products of the school of Leibl. Degas and Monet
were also among those who were persuaded to send work from Paris. In Berlin,
the storm surrounding Munch's exhibition in 1892 led to 11 artists setting
up their own exhibiting organization (Gruppe XI), which formed the nucleus
of the Berlin Secession, founded in
1898. Its members included Liebermann and the Symbolist artist Hofmann.
Many foreigners exhibited at the Berlin Secession, including artists as
varied as Blanche, Brangwyn, Cottet, Hodler, La Touche, Luce, Monet, Pissarro,
Raffaelli, Segantini, Vallotton, Vuillard, Whistler and Rodin. (See also:
Vienna Secession.) The growing prominence
of art dealers, such as Gurlitt and Cassirer in Berlin and Arnold in Dresden,
led to extensive exposure of the works of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.
The paintings of Van Gogh
(1853-90), the Pointillist Georges
Seurat (1859-91), Paul Cezanne
(1839-1906) and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), for instance, all became well
known around the turn of the century. Their works were illustrated in
periodicals and books and they achieved a mythic status a decade before
they became famous in England or the United States.

The influx of French Post-Impressionist
works into Germany after 1900 paved the way for the stylistic experiments
of early Expressionist paintings,
in which colour, drawing and subject matter became increasingly distorted,
expressing a greater psychological intensity than Corinth conveyed in
The Childhood of Zeus.

Artist Colonies:
Worpswede and Dachau

There remains one further strand of German
painting to be considered. Just as in France artists from all over the
world were drawn to Brittany, English artists to Cornwall, and Scottish
artists to Cockburnspath, so in Germany the desire to escape from the
cities found expression in artists' colonies that sprang up all over the
country. Two of the most famous and artistically significant were Worpswede
in the north and Dachau in the south. These colonies were not as remote
geographically as Pont-Aven. Worpswede was a village about 20 miles from
Bremen, itself a significant art centre, near Hamburg and the other major
urban centres of North Germany. Dachau was close to Munich. Artists from
both colonies exhibited at Secessionist and other exhibitions in the cities
from which they were so keen to escape. This escape into the country,
where Gemeinschaft (community) could exist as an alternative to
the Gesellschaft (society) of life in the city, was the basis of
many literary and artistic manifestations of the time. (See also: Folk
Art.) In 1889 Fritz Mackensen (1866-1953) and Otto Modersohn (1865-1943),
two painters in their early twenties, came to Worpswede from the Munich
and Dusseldorf Academies in an attempt to escape from what they perceived
to be the bourgeois realism of the traditional art institutions of the
cities. Soon they were joined by other artists and in the winter of 1894-5
they held their first group exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Bremen, an
exhibition which was then moved to the Munich Glaspalast, where their
work was seen as the German equivalent of the Glasgow Boys. Birch trees,
the heathland, moors and canals were the subjects of their paintings,
naturalistic themes which were often combined with Jugendstil
influences. This was also true of the Dachau painters, as the work of
Ludwig Dill (1848-1940) shows. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke sought out
Worpswede, as he was later to 'seek out' Rodin; he wrote poetic evocations
of both artistic phenomena. He found in Worpswede the quintessential significance
of northern landscape, as perfected by Jacob
Van Ruisdael (1628-82). Writing of Modersohn, he spoke of the artist
in the following manner:

He is the acknowledgment of the truth
of the Rembrandt-German. For him, too, the fowl, the herring and the
apple are more colourful than the parrot, the goldfish and orange. This
is, however, no restriction but rather a difference. He does not wish
to paint the southern aspect, which wears its colour on its sleeve and
swaggers with it. Things which are inwardly full of colour, which he
himself described in a manner which cannot be bettered, as the secret
devotional colour of the north, are his task. We will learn to value
this task and not overlook that life which tries to solve this task.
It is a still deeply feeling man, who has his own myths, his own Germanic
nordic world.

Paula
Modersohn-Becker

In 1898 the 23-year-old Paula Becker arrived
in Worpswede where she befriended the other young artists, met Rilke in
1900, and married Otto Modersohn in 1901. However she found the work of
her mentors too genre-like, and sought a simplicity of form and colour,
derived in part from her admiration for Von Marees and Bocklin, but more
importantly from the work of Van Gogh and Gauguin which she had seen in
Paris. Paula Modersohn-Becker
was thus one of the first direct transmitters to Germany of the lessons
of the great French Post-Impressionists. Her paintings represent a rejection
of naturalistic technique, without abandoning naturalist subject matter.

German
Post-Impressionism: Idealism versus Naturalism

The conflict between idealism and naturalism
was the central issue facing German Post-Impressionist painters of this
period. Their naturalism became progressively more colourful and freer
in execution until it resembled something akin to Impressionism, though
it had quite different sources. But above all, the Ideal, which since
the end of the eighteenth century had been the dominant strain in German
art, never really deserted the work of even the most 'Impressionist' artists.
(One might argue that idealism had been a factor since the German
Renaissance c.1430-1580.) Superficially there seemed to be some sort
of international style' in European painting, around 1900. In 1904 a German
critic, Albert Dresdner, wrote:

Pissarro in Paris, Liebermann in Berlin,
Klimt in Vienna, Claus in Belgium, Breitner in Holland, Maljavine in
Russia, all seem at first glance nationally and individually very different
artistic personalities - only on closer examination does a quite surprising
similarity in spirit, character and purpose show itself in the works
of all these artists. They are recognizable as variations of the impressionist
concept of art and show themselves
so ruled by that concept that national differences are blurred and in
some cases almost eliminated. In truth - never was art so 'un-national'
as today in this epoch of the national principle.

Fritz Burger did, however, perceive important
national differences between French and German art. For him, the French
appeared pragmatic but nonetheless firmly based in a classical tradition.
The German artist, he felt, was too concerned with subject matter to develop
a consistent technique: 'He seeks the essence in the subject itself'.

Munch and Hodler were less caught up in
this dilemma, perhaps because neither was German. In Germany, it was only
after 1905 that German Expressionism
found ways of fusing technique and content, observation and expression.
However, these dilemmas had given strength to the best German art of the
previous generation. Liebermann and Corinth in particular, the outstanding
German painters of this generation, shared with their French contemporaries
a concern to graft the lessons of naturalism on to the continuing traditions
of their own national art.

Works of German Post-Impressionism can
be seen in some of Europe's best art museums.

REFERENCES
We gratefully acknowledge the use of material from Norman Rosenthal's
scholarly article on Post-Impressionism in Germany, published (1979) by
the Royal Academy, London.